For the Love of God, Stop Asking When I'm Going to Have Another Kid

As regular readers know, I have a four-year-old daughter who is equal parts amazing and terrifying depending on just how many cookies her Nana gave her before handing her back over to me. She's an angel, sure, but so was Lucifer and look how well that turned out when he took a snit just a bit too far. All joking aside, I love my kiddo with all my heart.

There's an annoying aspect of having a single child that I continuously forget about. It happens at least once a week, and it pisses me off every time, yet by the time I get here to the rant box it's usually gone from my mind. It goes like this after mentioning or seeing my kid.

"So, just the one child?

"Yes."

"When's the next one?"

Now, this may seem like a really innocuous question, and being that I am a person that wrote more than 1,000 words on how Powerpuff Girls was secretly a communist plot, I know that I am prone to overreaction. That said, I can hear subtext loud and clear.

I differentiate between stay-at-home parents and professional parents. Stay-at-home parents are lovely, and if that is a path you want to walk and have the means to do so then by all means get marching with all my blessings. These are people who take a great deal of pride in maintaining a home and family life full-time, and that's a noble task that an industrial society slowly strangling middle-class wages to death doesn't often allow.

Professional parents, on the other hand, are annoying as hell for the same reason all Type-A personalities are annoying as hell. These are folks that approach parenting as both occupation and competition. Their goal is to "win" parenting, which is stupid because no one had ever, EVER won parenting in the history of the practice. Children are mercurial human tornadoes that may win a Nobel Peace Prize in a discipline you hate JUST BECAUSE YOU HATE IT! Zowie Bowie grew up, changed his name to Duncan Jones, and became an award-winning filmmaker based on a movie that turned the idea of a romantic space man into a nihilistic, cold, and distant nightmare.

The way that most professional parents measure their sales quotas and earnings by quarter is by setting increasingly arbitrary rules as to what is "real" parenting and what is not, conveniently placing their practices in the "real" category and leaving things that others do as the not real category. This includes stuff like making your own baby food, and enrolling your kid in Mandarin classes. Stuff like that.

More than anything else, though, is this idea that having one child doesn't count as being a parent as much as having another child. I fully acknowledge that taking care of a house full of kids is harder than me and my one, but that doesn't make me any less stressed as a parent or any less of one for that matter. Yet people can be pathologically attached to the idea at least a nuclear family that balances out nicely to four. Hell, as someone that's spent a few weeks playing with the Obamacare website I can tell you for a fact that as far as society is concerned you have a family of four or more, or you're basically single. No real middle ground.

People still have the mentality that they have to produce kids like they live in the old days. This planet can't sustain more people. It's irresponsible to have more kids than you can support and just as irresponsible to have kids that the earth can't support either.

I'd be tempted to reply, "We have exactly the child we wanted. We don't need to keep trying."
As the last of seven, I can tell you first hand that there is everything to be said for recognizing that resources (time, energy, money) are finite. If you can do your best for one kid, good for you.

Here, here! I totally know what you mean. I come from a proud line of only children and don't intend on having more that one myself for some of the reasons you've addressed. To each their own, but I don't ask people with more than 3 kids why so many...